Memography® establishes a new social classification system using a wiki. It provides taxonomies and pages that describe what each meme is about. Anyone can tag pages with memes from memography, or follow rules to create non-conflicting memes for corporate and personal use. Memelinks to aboutness pages are URIs that can be used as RDF properties for the semantic web.

Memography.com helps companies maximize ROI on taxonomies by using memes.

Combining existing taxonomies and ontologies with the equivalent of a bibliographic “call number” for every meme, memography is a technical advance based on library science and information architecture.

As with folksonomies, anyone can add meme tags to their web content to make it part of the new memetic web. Folksonomy applications are generally limited to specific websites, like flickr and del.icio.us. Memography is a social classification scheme that can be used throughout the web.

A folksonomy is a “bottom-up” architecture allowing users to make up arbitrary tags. Memography lets you create your own memes, but it adds the “top-down” architecture of multiple taxonomies to categorize and control the many descriptors available to add machine-readable meaning to your web pages.

A memelink is just a meme ID or tag wrapped in a hyperlink to the page on the memography wiki that describes the aboutness of the meme.

Just as an RFID tags a physical object (atoms), a meme ID tags a virtual object (bits). But you can use as many meme IDs as you like to completely describe the content.

Today we sent out advance notice to a lot more smart people and got some great feedback. (Tomorrow we will ask for discussion on the IAI mailing list.)

Bud Gibson pointed out that our meme naming scheme resembles Shelley Powers’ Tagback technique. Shelley combines a “bb” prefix for her own site (not too unique and extensible) with an adapted version of her post title, e.g, “introducingtagback.”

She includes a link to Technorati’s tag page for this tag. Something like our aboutness page for the meme? Anyway, like a shareable RDF resource URI?

Lou Rosenfeld asks how this will look from a users perspective. I know the complex meme ID’s are off-putting, trying to find a public one to share is a massive UI problem, and the delay between embedding it and getting crawled by the robots may be unacceptably long for pages with low rank.

We need a mechanism for people to easily make their own meme IDs.

A memespace prefix can be built by inverting your domain name, thus Shelley Powers owns MEMO.COM.BURNINGBIRD, which won’t conflict with other memespaces, as her “bb” is bound to do.

Thomas Vander Wal notes that Trackback might have accomplished something like this but for its spam problems. Popular memelinks will no doubt be spammed. Will it help that a memelink is on an identifiable web page?

Thomas points out that mis-tagging and rapid evolution of popular memes will reduce precision and recall pretty quickly. The hope is that results will remain good for relatively stable and specialized memes and ones that are kept relatively private (inside intranets, for example).

We’ve all noticed how Google will fix our misspellings, with their synonyms list suggesting the more likely search term - Did you mean Relevance?

When the misspelling is so bad it’s not in Google’s synonym rings, we have entered the huge space of random strings that are not in use anywhere (that is the future home for our meme IDs).

Companies have long tried to find misspellings that could become new brands, and the limited lexical space of domains has increased the pressure to misspell. Flickr is perhaps the best known Folksonomy site.

Peter Morville told us that Ross Mayfield of SocialText coined the misspelling indicatr to tag photos of corporate parking lots (a diagnostic tool to detect periods of intense R&D at the company).

And RSA Security, encryption and digital signature specialists, have an authentication product they call securID (nice play on security). At Jakob Nielsen’s User Expreince 2005 conference, Peter Morville pointed out that if you search the RSA site for secureID (note the extra “e”), hardly any results come back. When you misspell it correctly, hundreds of pages are found.

The amazing thing is Google’s synonym list, apparently with the preferred term being rated by their PageRank® algorithms. They ask - Did you mean SecurID? As Peter said, Google knows more about RSA’s business than RSA’s own search engine does.

“Crunching the Metadata” is an article in the November 13 Boston Globe that describes the need for new - and unique - identifiers that we can use to tag books of the future (and of course the entire contents of the web). Is he thinking of meme IDs?

David says ” we’ll need two things.”

“First, we’ll need what are known as unique identifiers-such as the call letters stamped on the spines of library books. ”

“Second, we’re going to need massive collections of metadata about each book. Some of this metadata will come from the publishers. But much of it will come from users…”

David seems to agree with our theme that “we all are librarians now” when he says “Using metadata to assemble ideas and content from multiple sources, online readers become not passive recipients of bound ideas but active librarians, reviewers, anthologists, editors, commentators, even (re)publishers.”

His latest post to JoHO argues that Web 2.0 and tagging will give way to the Year of the Unique ID.

Several comments are apropos of memography.

“When you have a large pile of stuff, you need a way to identify it. The more meaningful the names, the worse they scale. ”

“We could wait for authorities in each domain to issue the numbers, but we’ll make more progress faster if we accept that multiple interest groups within a particular domain are going to issue UIDs.”

“Why UIDs will be big and what they’ll look like”

“UIDs are going to be important because they enable people and systems to agree on what they’re talking about. Thus can systems interoperate and new applications can be built pulling together information and concepts from their digital diaspora. ”

“UIDs allows the sort of specificity that computers love. For example, when the person at the cash register (who well might be our daughter Leah, so be nice to her!) wands your groceries, the cash register knows exactly what you’re buying. But some items don’t come wrapped with neat little UPC’s printed on them. The canonical example is a book. ”

We have prepared a couple of printable (Word format) flyers to describe the memography and memetic web concepts.